Why Sarah walked away from a 'perfect' analytics SaaS
A Premium report revealed hidden technical debt and a traffic cliff that the seller hadn't disclosed.
Sarah Chen
Managing Partner at Quiet Growth Capital - Toronto, Canada
SaaS
MetricBoard
Dashboard analytics for marketing agencies
MRR
$11,500
Multiple: 27.8x
Asking / Final
$320,000
Final: N/A
Outcome
Walked away
Score: 41/100
AcquiCheck Scores
Overall
41
Financial
62
Code
28
Traffic
31
Legal
43
The context
Sarah's fund acquires B2B SaaS products in the $200K-$500K range. MetricBoard was listed on MicroAcquire with strong topline numbers: $11.5K MRR, 340 customers, and a claimed 3% monthly churn. The seller was a solo developer looking to exit after 4 years.
The challenge
At $320K, this was Sarah's largest potential acquisition. Her fund's thesis requires thorough due diligence, but her usual advisory firm quoted $12K and a 3-week timeline. She needed faster answers.
What AcquiCheck found
The codebase was a monolithic PHP application with zero test coverage. Last meaningful refactor was 18 months ago. Estimated 6-8 months of engineering work needed to modernize.
72% of organic traffic came from a single long-tail keyword cluster. A Google algorithm update 6 weeks prior had already reduced organic sessions by 34%, but this wasn't reflected in the trailing MRR yet.
Churn was actually 5.2% monthly when excluding annual plan customers. The 3% figure the seller quoted blended annual and monthly cohorts.
The application stored API keys in plaintext in the database. Three OAuth integrations used deprecated authentication flows.
No contributor license agreements. Two freelance developers had contributed significant code with no IP assignment.
The result
Sarah passed on the deal. The combination of declining traffic (which would eventually hit MRR), the engineering investment needed, and the IP risk made the 28x multiple unjustifiable. Two months later, MetricBoard relisted at $210K, confirming the traffic decline had started impacting revenue.
“The report saved us from a $320K mistake. The traffic analysis alone was worth it. We would not have caught the algorithm impact until it was too late. That's the kind of thing a Stripe screenshot doesn't show you.”
Sarah Chen, Managing Partner at Quiet Growth Capital
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